An effective way for manufacturers to tackle and outpace the increasing complexity of product designs and ever-shortening product lifecycles is to effectively develop and assist the workforce. Yet the current management of manufacturing workforce systems relies mostly on the traditional methods of data collection and modeling, such as subjective observations and after-the-fact statistics of workforce performance, which has reached a bottleneck in effectiveness.

This project has introduced a programming language, compiler, and runtime environment that enables software to control a “cyber-physical” microfluidic device in which integrated sensors and video monitoring equipment form a closed feedback loop (a). The technical contributions of the project include the design and implementation of the language, and a detailed description of the algorithms built into the compiler to enable fast decision-making in real-time in response to sensory feedback (b).